Copying Photos Across from a Pixel Phone & Maintaining Folder Structure

Kintarō Hattori

Hi Folks,

While my photos on my Pixel 4A 5G are backed up to Google Photos, I want to physically back them up from the phone to hard drive. The issue I'm having is that the Pixel phones don't seem to implement any folder structure that I can see. Having previously used Samsung phones up to the S8, they used folders which could just be copied across to a Windows PC. From what I can see with a Pixel phone, they are all just lumped in together.

I've done some Googling on the issue and from what I can see I'm not the only one having an issue with this. I couldn't find a resolution to the issue. Does anyone know if you can transfer photos across in a 'clean' manner?

28064212

Do you have them structured within the Photos app i.e. in albums? If yes, and they're backed up, then you can download them all at https://takeout.google.com/ and they'll come in a folder per album

banie01

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117900624#Comment_117900624

Thanks for that, I generally do it via photos.google.com and didn't know about this option.

Kintarō Hattori

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117900624#Comment_117900624

Thanks for that chief. My only concern there would be this. As they are uploaded to Google Photos, they probably aren't full quality photos.

I tried using the Photos app to move photos from the camera feed into a folder on the device and it's messed up the timeline of when photos were taken. It seems to be baffling difficul to copy photos across from device to a PC.

28064212

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117915840#Comment_117915840

Yes, probably not full quality.

Using the Photos app on the phone doesn't change the actual file system. It's more like Photos stores metadata: the file photos/123.jpg belongs to album "Pets", photos/124.jpg belongs to album "Holidays", and so on, but the files are all still in the flat folder photos.

To do what you want, I would recommend using the phone more like a classic digital camera - take the pictures, but then just copy them to the PC and use that as the definitive source that you can organise.

Kintarō Hattori

Many thanks. I thought I might have to resort to just copying them across and editing them manually. There's a crapload of photos so I had been hoping to avoid that :/